The Wall Street Journal reports Gold Market's Slide Brings Out the Bears.

Investors are placing a record number of bets that a protracted slump in gold prices will continue as the metal is punished by a strengthening U.S. dollar and rising interest rates.

Hedge funds and other speculative investors have increased wagers that gold prices will fall over the past five consecutive weeks, pushing them to their highest level ever during the week ended July 17, according to Commodity Futures Trading Commission Data going back to 2006.

As speculative investors have turned bearish, money managers began pulling money from gold-backed exchange traded funds. Investors yanked more than $2 billion out of gold-backed ETFs in June, the largest monthly outflow since July 2017, World Gold Council estimates show. Demand for American Eagle gold coins, a proxy for physical demand, has also been weak.

"This suggests that short sellers are pressing their bets," Sundial Capital Research's Jason Goepfert wrote in a note to clients last week. Typically the opposite happens when gold prices are bottoming out.